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Monday, April 29, 2013

Skylon

I wish that we can travel to space as quickly and easily as we do on planes. There are so many opportunities to commercialize space and yet we don't dedicate the resources and the manpower to make it happen. I think that we must have a significant push to try and get people and governments to understand the need for developing spaceflight. The ramifications if we don't might be disastrous.

The spacecraft above is from Reaction Engines, British aerospace company that is trying to get a vehicle from ground to low earth orbit in one shot, without stages. This is revolutionary due to the ability to take off like a plane and travel to space and back with as little mass as possible. The need for a huge liquid oxygen tank is gone, which is the biggest mass (oxidizer) penalty that every launch vehicle has to over come.

The engine acts like a jet engine in the atmosphere and then uses a heat exchanger to cool down the air as it goes faster and faster. When it reaches the limits of oxygen in our atmosphere, it changes to rocket mode and blasts off the rest of the way. Truly, amazing stuff! For a better description, I'd highly recommend a browse through their website.

Seeing stuff like this really gets me excited about the possibility of space travel. It give me great hope that one day people will travel among the stars. I want to follow in the great pioneers of people who had crazy dreams and stuck to it when no one believed in them.